ONT Axes P2 Solo, Roiling Community

Oxford Nanopore has a serious case of user community unrest, triggered by the announcement that the P2 Solo (aka P2s) will be phased out starting this summer.  P2 Solo is the two flowcell version of PromethION which required external GPU for basecalling; P2i is the sibling with onboard GPU. P2 Solo clearly has a very passionate constituency, one which feels betrayed by its discontinuation.  This ongoing episode - ONT could always change their mind and restore the P2 Solo - is a cautionary tale of the challenges of changing corporate strategy in the context of a brand which has built a near cult-like loyalty. 

JP Morgan 2026 Roundup

The J.P. Morgan conference last week was mostly small tidbits of info on the sequencing front, with Element delivering the one big teaser announcement. 

JPM 2026 Schedule Through A Molecular Tools & Testing Lens

The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is this week in San Francisco.  As with every other one, I'm tracking any news remotely from Boston.  Some year I really should go to observe the sheer spectacle of it, but this isn't the year - and if I were in California now it probably would be more valuable to attend Plant & Animal Genomes down in San Diego.  If you do go, be sure to check out the 4 instrument autonomous laboratory Ginkgo will have running in the Marriott Marquis lobby.  But here are some notes to keep track of when different companies are presenting.  Public companies will make their presentations available shortly thereafter to comply with insider trading regulations.  Unfortunately, several years ago J.P. Morgan ended posting presentations from private companies - these companies could choose to post their decks but I'm not optimistic to see many.

Stalking the Elusive Product Market Fit

I had a wonderful breakfast conversation back in November with Arima Genomics Founder (and now President and Chief Operating Officer) Sid Selvaraj where he brought up the topic of product market fit.  I've often kibitzed on 'omics companies trials and tribulations trying to achieve product market fit, but now that I'm in an outward-facing product development role the concept is central to my daily work.  What is it and how does one achieve it - or fail to?

Scales of Instrumentation and Automation

Back in September I moved into a product role within the automation unit at Ginkgo, where we sell autonomous laboratories.  I'm going to end up posting a bunch on the topic, as I spend a lot of time thinking about it and this is an interesting place to expose my thinking to critique.  It's also a way to solicit feedback on semi-formed ideas.  I referenced autonomous laboratories in my previous post, which might have some wondering "what exactly is an autonomous laboratory?"  So this post will lay out a description of different levels of automation (or instrumentation) so I can refer back to it in future posts - and there will certainly be further posts focused on these different scales of automation. So here I will lay out four levels of laboratory instrumentation: Bench, Walkup, Workcell and Autonomous.  BTW, if you are in San Francisco next week during J.P. Morgan,  there will be a small autonomous lab running in the Marriott Marquis lobby - and it can be viewed regardless of whether you are registered for the conference

Sequencing Instrument Outlook 2026

The Joy of Rediscovery

A key goal of science is to discover new information, and it is one of the great joys of science to believe you have done so.  Sometimes it really does prove novel and interesting - an experience our genome explorations at Warp Drive Bio gave me often - and sometimes the joy is blunted by realizing what you thought was novel is already known.  When I was a graduate student I was on an immense high having found what seemed revolutionary while trawling through Genbank, but then a few days later I uncovered a Cell paper less than a year earlier which had shown that Archea possessed a Eukaryote-like transcription initiation system.  So close yet so far!  But there is also a special joy in certain rediscoveries, when without trying at all a fundamental fact about the universe just reveals itself in your data.  One of my New Year's resolutions is to rediscover the discipline to write frequently in this space, and so to kick that off early (and get the 2025 count to an even one quarter of a 96-well plate) I'm going to review my favorite rediscovery - one that that surprisingly few (in my opinion) who should know of this result are aware of it.